Heraclix and Pomp: A Novel of the Fabricated and the Fey (8 page)

She spots one of her ten thousand sisters, Gloranda, the rainbow-haired one. Gloranda is leaning around the edge of a tree, peeking at something, with her back to Pomp.

Pomp buzzes over and lays her head on Gloranda’s shoulder.

Gloranda barely acknowledges Pomp, so focused is she on what she is watching.

In the distance, plump Doribell and Ilsie, twins, are saddling a large bat.

“He bucks!” Doribell says, giggling.

“And squeaks!” Ilsie says.

They jump on the bat’s back, nearly crushing it. The bat squeaks, the fairies giggle.

“Hi, Gloranda!” Pomp says.

“Shh!” says Gloranda. “I’m doing a trick.”

“It is good to see you,” Pomp says.

“You are here,” Gloranda says matter-of-factly.

“I am here . . . now,” says Pomp. “There is another place where I am not here.”

“That’s crazy talk,” says Gloranda. “You are here.”

Pomp is silent, unable to explain what she means, how she has been elsewhere and has returned after an absence. The words “been” and “after” will not come to mind, and even if they do, Gloranda will not understand.

“And the twins are there,” Gloranda continues. “And that bat is squeaky!”

Gloranda darts off, flying low to the ground. Then she is under the bat’s shadow, flying up. She sees the strap holding the saddle to the bat and unbuckles it.

The twins start falling off the saddle. They kick and grope, each one clawing at the bat, latching on to its sensitive face. Their weight is too much, and the bat’s neck snaps broken. It falls from the sky and hits the ground underneath Doribell’s and Ilsie’s combined crushing weight. Something pops and the bat is still.

“I do my trick!” Gloranda shouts with glee.

Pomp, from behind the tree, can’t help but giggle at the prank. And yet . . . and yet . . .

What is “yet”?

One
,
two
,
three
, and
four
are now, but
ten
is yet. And yet—there it is again—it is more than just numbers. It is how things happen now . . . and yet. Her mind spins, and in the midst of the swirling nausea, she cannot help but think that she would never understand, except that she had almost become not yet . . . almost, what is the word?
Dead
?

And there lays the bat. Not moving. Not breathing. Dead.

“It’s broken,” says Ilsie. She is bored, Pomp sees. Ilsie joins hands with Doribell and Gloranda, and the fairies fly off, leaving the broken bat behind.

Pomp is very, very confused. She walks over to the bat and tries petting it, but it does not respond.

“Get up, bat,” she says. “Fly away!”

She thinks she should be happy about Gloranda’s brilliant trick, but she is not happy at all.

“Wake up!” she jostles the bat, lifting a wing only to have it drop back to the ground, limp.

Her eyes are getting wet when she feels the hole open up inside her heart. She looks for the X on her chest, like Heraclix’s scar, but there is nothing there.

“Why does it hurt without hurting?” she asks herself. “Why am I . . . sad?”

She has seen sad before, in the human world. But now she is sad. It is a new feeling, and she does not like it. She does not like it so much that it makes her angry! Angry!

“Sisters!” she screams. “You have made it . . . dead!”

But no one responds to her shouting and crying. She is all alone.

She is sad and angry and scared because this, this “dead” almost happens to her.

The hole inside her feels like it is growing. She has to do something, or it will swallow her up.

“Think, Pomp, think!” she says, trying to bring a word into her mind, a word she hears Heraclix say when he is sad and empty. She thinks, walks around in circles around the dead bat, then thinks some more.

“What is it, Pomp? What is it he does when he is sad and empty?”

And then she remembers.

She
remembers
.

“Purpose!”

Yes, “purpose” is the word Heraclix says before they go back to Mowler’s apartment to get the documents.

As her mind catches hold of this, the hole inside her gets a little smaller.

She realizes that she has changed. Things are different.

Her life isn’t now about playing pranks all day every day. It isn’t about not caring. All this playing pranks and not caring isn’t fun any more. If she goes on like this, her life stays immortally, eternally . . . boring. Death is sad, but death makes life more worth living.

Life is precious
, she thinks as she looks down at the dead bat again. Bugs have begun to crawl over the bat, just like bugs had crawled all over Heraclix.

But she won’t let Heraclix become like the bat. Pomp will not let Heraclix die. She will help him.

Heraclix turned to face east, then west, then east again, standing atop the stone pillar above the tops of the trees. Bozsok, his desired destination, lay to the east. Vienna, burning, lay to the west. He was far enough away that he could not see the smoke, but he knew it was there, swirling around the soldiers and gypsies, carrying the screams and groans of the wounded and dying up into the vast, unheeding sky.

Had he reason to feel sorrow up to this point? Of course he had. But there was something in the quality of sorrow suffered at the hands of another that was different than the sorrow that one brought on others, whether through one’s own stupidity and neglect or by intentional acts of hatred. The latter carried the sharpest stings of guilt, regret, self-berating, whereas the former was more easily dissociated from one’s self.

“Mowler suffered for his evil actions,” Heraclix said to himself. “I suffer for my ignorant acts.”

He thought of the hand, looked at it, studying this thing so alien yet so much a part of him. He wondered if the same silver ichor
flowed through it that had flowed, and only recently staunched, from the wound in his thigh.

“And I bring and suffer pain for those things over which I have no control. Is there no end to this pain and suffering?”

He looked down the side of the stone pillar on which he stood. Twenty feet below him, the tops of the pines scratched at the open air. Beneath their green tufts, a chlorophyll ocean whose depths he could not fathom coursed in waves. Could a dive into such a place hold salvation for him? He had been born, that he knew. And that which was born must die, was it not so? Perhaps he could end his suffering and the suffering of all those around him who had paid for his ignorance.

Yet he felt, somehow, that this would be a cheat, that, though his life might cease, suffering would continue on in the world. And who knows what suffering awaits the dead, if there is a life after?

For him, there was a life after. This was evidenced by his very existence as what he was. He had been “born,” but he had been born of that which had died, which must have had an earlier birth at a time or times completely veiled to him by the bloody cauldron-womb of his inception as Heraclix. What had these men suffered or caused to be suffered before their deaths and his birth?

He could not in good conscience make a decision to end his existence without knowing all there was to know about these men—their desires, their hopes, their stories. Perhaps it was cowardly guilt, perhaps a clinical curiosity—he knew not which, but something simply drove him to know, a lust for information about those whose constituent pieces, together, made him
him
.

With great difficulty, owing to his leg, he climbed down the stone pillar and continued over the mountains, the Kőszeg Mountains, he thought he recalled from one of the many maps that he had perused in the time before the fire, toward Bozsok, the home of the once-boy who had delivered the Serb’s hand to the sorcerer.

“. . . sickly and stooped, a runt, but a good, innocent lad . . .” This is how the boy—perhaps a man now, perhaps not, Heraclix could not know—was described in the Serb’s letter. He pictured a lad somewhere in his midteens, his face long, eyes sunken, bony
cheeks pronounced from poverty. The boy’s skin was smooth, not yet creased by age or worry, lost hope, and regret. But there was a knowing glimmer in his eyes. Innocence still held sway, but cruel experience camped around the borders, sending assassins in to lie in wait, anticipating the signal to set fire to the foundations of the boy’s emotions, to burn his sense of trust to the ground. Perhaps there was time, Heraclix thought, to save the lad, or at least to steel him for what life would bring him, if it hadn’t already arrived.

The mountains crested not far to the east and gradually lost their elevation as they stretched southeast. Even with Heraclix’s great endurance and speed, he was not out of the mountains by evening. The thickness of the trees sped the fall of night, blanketing him in darkness. Beyond the invisible leaves, clouds rolled in, and rumbling thunder heralded gentle sheets of rain that distorted—but did not completely muffle—the sound of wolves baying in the distance.

After pain-filled and uncomfortable hours of travel, the mountains settled into less-densely forested foothills, the wolves’ howls decreased, and the intensity of the storm increased. Lightning, striking from all directions, led to confusion, hesitation, and bad judgment that had Heraclix heading back up into the mountains before he realized that he was going in the wrong direction. He doubled back again, frustrated at the setback. Heraclix was wet, miserable, and distraught. The agony of his leg had grown. The wound was indeed spreading beneath his stitched up skin. His time was limited.

Half the night had fled by the time he finally found the edges of the village. The rain was a torrent by this point, and the lightning only let up for short periods. The buildings all had their shutters tied with leather thongs to keep the elements outside.

One structure was larger than the others—possibly the centerpiece of town, though it was difficult to judge the relative size of the buildings in the fluctuating perspective caused by the lightning. A large wooden sign swung back and forth over the front door. On it, a carved octopus wrestled with an armored unicorn over an unfamiliar constellation of stars. The engraved words above them read T
HE
E
TERNAL
S
TRUGGLE
in Gothic script.

The oaken front door was sticky, swollen in its frame from the rain that beat sideways against it. Heraclix tried to open it, but he had to push his shoulder up against it to get enough leverage. The door suddenly opened with a snap and Heraclix fell onto the floor. He gathered himself up, thinking of how his position reminded him of his birth in Mowler’s apartment.

The door slammed behind him, shut and barred by a middle-aged man in an apron whose most striking feature was his bushy, tightly curled black hair and handlebar mustache.

“You’re the last one!” the curly-haired man said. “Next person that tries to come in, I stab him!” he held up a corkscrew. Heraclix looked around the room and understood the man’s consternation immediately. It was a tavern, and everywhere were people, some speaking in low tones, most sleeping on any flat surface they could find, be it floor, table, bar, or crate. This might have been the entire village’s shelter from the storm. And the entire village, save for a trio of passed-out drunks in the corner, looked at Heraclix with wide eyes.

“Furthermore, if I have to mop . . .” the curly-haired man looked up at Heraclix’s bulky frame, his speech incrementally slowing with each word “. . . one . . . more . . . drop . . .” He stopped without finishing his sentence.

“Ah, I’m afraid,” the man said, apologetically, “you’ll have to rest by the door.”

The rest of the crowd was not inclined to take so generous a view of the giant in their midst. Those who did not immediately roll back over into sleep glowered at Heraclix and mumbled among themselves. Heraclix wondered if he had not found himself in the Gypsy quarter of Bozsok, if there was such a thing.

“Look what the storm drove in,” said a muscular bearded man with a long mane of red hair. He wore an apron that branded him as a bartender, butcher, or blacksmith. Heraclix decided he must be the last, given the charcoal smudges on the man’s fingers, temples, and forehead.

“You’ve never been here before,” said a short, skinny devil of a fellow whose piercing eyes were almost as dark as the black doublet and breeches that he wore. He was decidedly ugly, but his clothes were of the finest workmanship and neatly pressed, unlike the rest
of the motley villagers in the tavern. Heraclix could even catch the shine of the man’s boots from across the room.